From the thread about Jewish/American food:
I’ve never thought about it in depth. It’s not, as far as I know, because there were food variety shortages like post-war England. It’s not, as far as I know, because traditional American cookery was abysmal. But I’ve got one of my mothers cookbooks which is entirely recipes based on canned food.
What do you think?
No answer but this is always a must-link for this topic.
The Gallery of Regrettable Food.
A lot of it had to do with the “new, improved” methods of packaging food that came of age in the 50s and 60s. Dehydrated, processed, Americanized pap. The one thing the recipes all had in common was that they were quick. More and more women were moving into the workplace, and “quick meals” were supposed to be the working mother’s salvation. It wasn’t entirely that way, of course. Mexican food started to make inroads across America about this time. So did other ethnic cuisines. It just took time for the melting pot to consume the crap and give forth the nuggets of perfection.
Part of it also had to do with the fallout from the Depression era food shortages and wartime rationing. Women who raised children through the depression were grandmothers by the 60’s, and women who grew up in the Depression were moms. Neither of these generations had the opportunity to be adventurous about food, they had to make do with what was available, including a reliance on canned foods (either home canned or commercially canned).
Oh I dunno. A bunch of guys down at the local saloon still have an annual Campbell’s Soup Tator Tot Bake Off and the ladies have the Campbell’s Classic Green Bean Casserole Contest. Participants take it v-e-r-y seriously.
I grew up on most of the food in the OP. It represents comfort food to me. Well, except the overcooked roast beef. My mom actually made a pretty good pot roast. I still eat things such as Hamburger Helper, and Swanson’s frozen dinners are actually half decent.
One thing I’ve noticed after living abroad is that every time I come back there are at least a dozen new brands of junk food on supermarket shelves.
I don’t know that Americans eat “better” now than they did 50 years ago. Fads come and go, but I still eat and like most of the stuff in the OP (except I’ve always liked my roasts and burgers rare). Not only is it convenient, it’s “comfort food” to me too.*
*And I am an **excellent **cook, even if I do say so myself. 
Ham loaf can be good!
Otherwise, I’m with silenus. Convenience foods were the bane of American cuisine.
Pre-depression American food could be very good indeed. See Nero Wolfe’s spirited defense of the quality of our base ingredients, and the expertise of our native cooks, in Rex Stout’s 1938 detective novel TOO MANY COOKS. “The bouillabaisse of Marseilles is mere ballast for a stevedore compared with its namesake in New Orleans!” (Quote from memory)
After WWII American soldiers returned with a taste for the foods they’d had in Europe, if they were lucky and got away from the mess tents. We have them to thank for widespread availability of pizza.
A very very good book on the subject is John & Karen Hess’s A TASTE OF AMERICA, which came out in the late '70s and is still worth reading.
I grew up with that food, and it was pretty good. But both my parents cooked.
The problem was that frozen foods were just beginning, and most stuff was still canned. There weren’t nearly as many fresh ingredients as today. And even in New York we had Italian food and Chinese food - and of course deli and Jewish food, but that was ours. The influence of other cuisines hadn’t hit yet. Awful ChunKing chowmein was considered exotic back then.
When I think of this type of food, I remember that horrendous stuff called creamed corn.
I haven’t had it in over 30 years. Don’t miss it at all, and don’t plan on eating it ever again.
I love creamed corn. I like it better than whole kernel.
It’s not just the new ways of packing food, but the cultural zeitgeist that embraced all things technological. Taste is influenced heavily by psychological factors.
In other words, it’s very possible that they thought the new foods actually tasted better. Just like, since I don’t have the negative associations with Applebees, I actually think it tastes really good. To me, Applebees is going high up, unlike the cheaper local places.
Agreed. The idea at the time was technical efficiency. We were in the space age and quickly moving into a future world. Many predictions about the future had food in pill form. Sports stadiums were round concrete donuts that both baseball and football teams could use. The architectural style of buildings were rectangular boxes. Why piss around with beautiful decor? Baseball can be played in a concrete donut just fine; no need to spend millions extra for the ambiance.
We are on the way to the moon and then to Mars! The future is simply efficiency!
So true. And now we’ve bifurcated: Locavores and, the current ultimate in Man’s efficiency-ization (shut up; it’s a word) of food, Soylant: https://www.soylent.com I read about it in The New Yorker. An efficient, technically nutrient rich food replacement. ::shudder::
Fresh Air had a fascinating interview about Depression-era cooking. An excerpt:
According to them, exciting food was considered a flaw, not a feature, in many areas, sort of a lingering Puritanism that suggests that exciting food leads to exciting drugs. Much American cooking emphasizes blandness, satiety, and nutrition above all other virtues. The 1950s weren’t necessarily an improvement.
Remember when microwave ovens first hit the scene?
A friend’s mom had the first microwave in the neighborhood. She made horrible meals in it, always over cooking. “It said three minutes, but how could it really be done that fast, so I gave it five more”.
ETA: and when she served the shoe leathered crap, “and look!! The plate is cool to the touch!!”
yep, I remember this well. thankfully we came to our senses. I just wish we could recognize people like Ancel Keys for the frauds they were; demonizing fats while inflicting garbage like hydrogenated oils on everyone did plenty of damage. but hey, it was the Atomic Age, we wanted the best foods science could create!
I grew up in the 50s and 60s. There was certainly less variety in food, especially in fresh vegetables, where many things you find routinely today you just couldn’t get (e.g., kale, avocado, grape tomatoes, jalapenos) or could only get in season.
Dishes were simpler,* without fancy sauces (or even white sauce, which I never heard about until the mid-70s). That doesn’t make it bad; it meant it depended on the skill of the cook.
And my mother was a pretty good cook (as was her mother). Some of my favorites from that era were:
Corn flake chicken (note who I linked to) where the chicken was dredged in crushed corn flakes and baked.
London broil (note: the cuts labeled “London broil” in the supermarket these days are not right for London broil, which is made from flank steak). Marinated flank steak put under a broiler just long enough to crisp the top (and flipped to repeat that on the other side). The interior is blood rare, and you have to cut it on an angle across the fibers. The result is thin, tender, crispy on the outside, and delicious.
Fried liver. I know this isn’t for anyone, but it’s delicious and certainly my favorite meal. You dredge beef liver in breadcrumbs, then fry it in butter for 2-3 minutes a side (add more butter when you flip it). The interior should have a tinge of pink when served. I once made it for someone who hated liver and she admitted it tasted pretty good.
She also made an excellent meat loaf, too.
We lived on Long Island, so seafood – clams and scallops – were often on the menu for special occasions. Sometimes we’d cook fish we caught (my favorite was blowfish – a cousin of fugu).
When fresh vegetables were in season, we’d have them. Otherwise, we used frozen (never canned). We did make salads from the things we could get – iceberg lettuce, cucumber, tomato, celery, carrots. I preferred Russian and Catalina dressing, which was uncommon (Italian was the most popular at the time).
Potatoes were a part of each meal, usually baked (my favorite – we would hollow them out and then eat the skins with butter. Mmmmmm.).
I don’t recall her ever making fried chicken. Or a casserole. She cooked vegetables – fresh or frozen – just long enough to heat them up; often they were put on the stove just before she took the main course out of the oven.
Today, of course, we have far more options, far more recipes, and due to the Internet, better access to recipes. But it’s untrue that there wasn’t good food in that era – there were just bad cooks.
*Julia Child had trouble finding a publisher for her Mastering the Art of French Cooking because people believe that home cooks weren’t interest in fancy dishes that too a lot of time to prepare.
After FDR’s election in 1932, Eleanor hired her friend Henrietta Nesbitt as White House housekeeper. Nesbitt was an able baker (heh) but a lousy, unimaginative cook. Franklin was a man who enjoyed good food, and he suffered under the Nesbitt meal plan of endless Meat-And-Three, and diet of overcooked vegetables, tough meat, marshmallow-based salads, and Jell-O desserts.
Historians theorize that Eleanor kept Henrietta on to punish Franklin for his extra-marital horndogging, and Franklin kept quiet about her food out of guilt over same.
Awful photos of ridiculous ‘retro’ food are all over the internet, usually things entombed in gelatin and festooned to a fare-thee-well with olives and radish roses. Now, that kind of thing was descended from classic French cuisine involving truffles and forcemeats - but modern Americans had jello, which was the same thing as gelatin, right? Right? So jello molds were popular enough, and still are…I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s, and I do remember cans, boxes, and frozen foods were popular. There wasn’t much variety of fruits, vegetables, bread, and so on. We went to the A&P and bought cold cuts, Velveeta, hamburger and hot dogs, white bread, potatoes, iceberg lettuce, celery, apples or oranges, bananas, packaged cookies, a smallish box of potato chips (not the dozens of varieties of all sizes and flavors we have today!) and for a special treat once a week, Ann Page Spanish Bar (a spice cake with white frosting). My mother could be a pretty good cook, though most meals were simple: a meat, boiled potatoes, a canned vegetable, and sometimes a lettuce salad with oil and vinegar. We each got one serving, and that was all - no seconds, no leftovers. Breakfast was cereal of our choice or toast. Lunch was a peanut butter and jelly or bologna sandwich with an apple or carrot sticks. Chinese food was indeed exotic, though for a treat we would have chow mein from a can over rice - there were no Chinese takeout restaurants. We lived in a town of Italian (and to a smaller extent, German) immigrants, so we had a lot of basic Italian food. On special occasions, my dad would grill a huge steak and we would all get once piece of that. To this day, my husband likes meatloaf or pot roast or turkey, with mashed potatoes and gravy more than anything else I could cook - it’s what he grew up eating. I am much much more adventurous, given a choice!